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This past weekend, family members that I don’t normally get to see were in town. Aunt Judy suggested that some of us see a movie and then get lunch together. “Do you want to go see Sully?” she asked me.

“What’s it about?” All I could think of was Monsters Inc., which didn’t sound like something Aunt Cindy would join Judy in watching.

“Oh, you know. It’s about that pilot who had birds fly into his engines so that he had to make an emergency landing on the Hudson.”

This did not sound promising. How could a feature-length film be made out of an event that presumably took fewer than five minutes? No wonder it was shorter than Florence Foster Jenkins and The Light Between Oceans. I decided to join my aunts, if only so they wouldn’t have to wait 20-40 minutes for me to finish watching a longer movie.

…so to begin with, you can tell that I either didn’t hear, or forgot, that the events of this movie actually happened my last year of undergrad. My roommate pointed out – after asking what rock I’d been under so as to miss this when it went down in 2009 – that deplaning takes several hours when the Coast Guard and police dive teams get involved.

More than that, when you’re the captain responsible, the moments feel like hours. Sully captures both the worst-case scenario – both engines out, a plane dead in the air, everyone having to utilize the exit doors, inflatable raft, and life preservers after ignoring the attendants’ safety lecture – and the best-case scenario: every single person getting off the plane intact, being taken to shore, and receiving medical attention if needed.

Also depicted:

– the people on the flight. A wheelchair-bound grandma, picking a snow globe from the gift shop for her granddaughter. An older man, his son, and the son’s friend, all of whom are desperate to get on the flight for a long-awaited golfing trip. A woman and her baby girl, sitting beside a solicitous gentleman. People who are sleeping, people who look sick, people who are excited.

– what might have been. Captain Suhlenberger, Sully for short, has episodes of imagining how it could have gone if he’d turned this way or that. He envisions distressing New York anew by crashing into another skyscraper – especially poignant to watch this past weekend.

– the real-world fallout. Did he make the right choice? Sully wonders throughout. The world hails his water landing as miraculous, while the airline and its insurance agents question whether he might have made it safely back to the runway at La Guardia, plane intact. Algorithms in plenty, as well as pilots put through a simulation, seem to indicate that he could have, and thus should have, made that turn. What, then, becomes of his career? Of his 40 years of flight? This last aspect gripped me the most, as it is entirely possible for someone to put forth the most profound effort, to remarkable results, and still be fired or vilified for it.

Despite my expectation that Sully might be an hour and a half of boredom, I was profoundly moved by its depiction of reality. Theatres are glutted with superhero movies, stuffed with explosions, full of sound and fury and signifying little.

Talking of: if you watch only one Tom Hanks movie this year, please don’t let it be Inferno.

It was good to see the collateral damage kept to a minimum for once.

It was better to see the air traffic controllers, the Coast Guard, the police divers, and other emergency response teams assemble for their work of helping, rescuing, and fixing. In a world full of accidents and mechanical failure and wicked designs, we need the reminder that such men and women are bound to serve when everything goes to hell.

It was best to see Sully taking the fate of 155 souls as seriously as a pilot ought, keeping them all as safe as possible.

Among other odd things the internet has told me recently, I heard of an app for casual fistfights called Rumblr. As I was sharing this supposed fact with a friend via chat – “Look, it’s for all those times when you need to punch a guy but cannot find one available for punching” – I checked it on Snopes, only to find that it’s not a real app. Rather, some blokes wanted to start a creative consulting agency, and creating buzz around this fictitious app was part of their portfolio: look! We can get the whole world talking about a Fight Club app, even though there’s no such thing; imagine what we could do for you and your real company and its real products. Even though they’re very quotidian and boring. We have the skills. Our engagement with the market convinces them to pay very real attention.

As my friend George put it: “This all feels like a disgustingly post-modern subversion of the fight club idea – an imaginary fight club app (already a subversion) that is meant to advertise for a consulting agency (more subversion). There are so many levels of insincerity piled on top of something that was originally supposed to be about stripping away the false modern facade of life and reducing men to their primal instincts…It’s kind of grand, really.”

I’m putting it in my mental file next to “an e-reader version of 1984 where the text changes as you read it.”

As in my post of last week, I am in the position of reviewing a book long after I first read it. However, after reading Neil Postman’s Technopoly last March, I reread it in May, took copious notes on it in June, and still have it to hand for further consideration, because this book gave me so very much to ruminate upon.

Having stumbled over the book’s prologue while idly Googling the story of King Thamus and the Egyptian god of invention Theuth, I wondered how I had never heard of this author before. Postman wrote at least seventeen books about the nature of education, how various technologies and media can contribute to (or interfere with) it, and the effect this all has on humans, particularly children. The bulk of his work and writing occurred between 1960 and 1990, and Technopoly was published in 1992.

All of this is to say that, though Postman analyzes a technological landscape over twenty years old, so much of it still rings true that the man seems somehow prophetic.

His thesis: technology appears to be a friend, but does not give us time for reflection on potential losses before it changes the world. As scientists and inventors strive to make life easier, healthier, and longer…technology begins to usurp the place of our critical thinking and our consciences. It is so intertwined with modern life that most of us have difficulty finding a distant enough vantage point to see what consequences, secretly intended or unintentional, may follow. As King Thamus tells Theuth (or Thoth), “the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it.” The king referred to writing, distinguishing memory and wisdom themselves from the recollection and appearance of wisdom which writing would make possible.

Basically, technology can be used for good or ill – but once the tool is in the culture, it will change it: not just here or there, but throughout. For example, a culture that can produce written records can – eventually will – shift away from having an oral tradition. Hurrying toward what is ahead, the inventor does not necessarily examine all these implications, all the ways his invention will change the world – nor do those using it ask, typically. Instead, everyone emphasizes their hope for all the good this invention will bring. The culture thus conspires against itself: the onlookers cannot know how this novelty will change their existence, nor that they might well end up on “the losing side” of a technology.

Maintaining that technologies reflect and create the ways people perceive reality, Postman sets out his definitions (by description) of tool-using cultures, technocracy, and technopoly. Tool-using cultures use tools – many or few, simple or sophisticated, beloved or held in contempt – to solve problems of physical life, or to serve the symbolic world (e.g., art, politics, myth, ritual, religion). The tools are determined and directed by the culture, thus they generally do not attack the dignity or integrity of it. Rather, the culture is unified in belief (possibly theocratic), which provides order and meaning for the people within it.

He does list some tools which can intrude on cultural beliefs – the stirrup, the clock, mills, matches, and rifles – so I think those can be tied to the rise of Technocracy. Here, tools are central to the world of thought. Technocracy disdains and subordinates, but does not destroy, social or symbolic traditions (partly because it’s too new to change venerable phenomena like elder wisdom, regional pride, or social structure; partly because it’s busy doing other things). Postman notes that Western technocracies were rooted in the clock, the printing press, and the telescope: three tools which changed the fabric of how society organized time, disseminated many new ideas to all sorts of new readers, and how men viewed the cosmos and their place in it. Listing off various natural philosophers-become-scientists, Postman avers that the precision of man’s knowledge of the cosmos “collapsed [the] moral center of gravity,” causing “the psychic desolation of an unfathomable universe.” Even so, the believing scientists remained faithful, concerning themselves with learning and truth, not power or progress…until Francis Bacon came along. Thereafter, people came to believe that knowledge was power and continuing progress was possible, while their belief in God was shaken if not obliterated.

More inventions, more factories, more production, faster communication…generally, people learned how to make this all happen, but didn’t spend as much time asking why. And so western society approached Technopoly: a totalitarian technocracy, wherein efficiency, objective data, and unambiguous calculation is valued more highly than human judgment, human dignity, or the complexity of the unmeasurable. “Lacking a lucid set of ethics and having rejected tradition, Technopoly searches for a source of authority and finds it in the idea of statistical objectivity.” Thus ideas are reduced to objects, abstractions are ranked, and realities which were never meant to be reduced to numbers – human intelligence, a student’s understanding of a subject, beauty, ability, how people regard political candidates, etc. – are flattened and simplified until they fit into such boxes.

Postman acknowledges that a certain amount of generalization or oversimplification is necessary for everyone, given that we are awash in information: the sorcerer’s apprentice, with only a broom against the flood. But in the past, some institution (familial society, religion, etc.) provided the framework for belief and understanding, dictating what was of greater or lesser importance. Technocracy unraveled that moral and intellectual coherence, and now such institutions, and such overarching structures of belief, are held in suspicion by the Technopoly-addled. What do they have instead? An incomprehensible universe, and an unending river of data sans context. Data management becomes the driving concern – again, not asking why this information or that must be preserved, but only caring how. “Information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.”

So. Having been alarmed by the way in which society regards the universe as incoherent, the vicious cycle of bureaucracy, and blatant reductionism, what can we do?

Postman’s response – he admits that it’s not really a solution – is that, at an individual level, we must cling fast to the narratives and symbols which quicken us and organize our thought.

At a societal level, schools are probably the best arena for improvement. The curriculum therein tends to have some coherence and connectedness, and presents ideas or attitudes that can permeate “a person with no commitment, no point of view, but plenty of marketable skills.” Or so we hope. Since it’s unlikely that religion, love of country, or emotional health would be used to provide structure for students’ knowledge, something else must do so. Postman suggests “the ascent of man” – the idea that “humanity’s destiny is the discovery of knowledge.” The arts and humanities can be joined with science “to gain a unified understanding of nature and our place in it.” Instead of excising anything religious, a study of religious systems can (apparently) help tell “the story of humanity’s creativeness in trying to conquer loneliness, ignorance, and disorder.”

The sudden influx of quotations probably displays my feelings toward this approach: I can’t actually summarize it and keep a straight face. I agree that it’s valuable for our culture to have a nontechnical or noncommercial concept of education, but I don’t know that this approach to learning would be able to overwrite society’s years of emphasis on education as the means to achieve material or financial success; after so many years of people asking “How?” I don’t know how to convince everyone to ask “Why?” instead.

Postman also recommends teaching as much history as possible – not only the history of political events, or of each school subject, but of history itself. This, he hopes, can help illuminate why we know the things we know, whence our ideas and sensibilities issue, and how cultures change. He urges that different theories be propounded if not endorsed or established: “To teach the past simply as a chronicle of indisputable, fragmented, and concrete events is to replicate the bias of Technopoly, which largely denies our youth access to concepts/theories, providing only a stream of meaningless events.” Which has always been my problem with understanding history: why bother remembering distinct events if I don’t understand the point of them? Postman agrees with that: “The worst thing we can do is present [facts] devoid of coherence.” Rather, we should go beyond the event into larger concepts, theories and hypotheses, comparisons and evaluations.

For my own part, stuck in my unfashionable Christian beliefs and morality system, it’s clear that human-centered solutions cannot fill a spiritual pit. Technology cannot cure its own disease. Practical decisions cannot solve moral quandaries. There can be no experts in child-rearing and lovemaking and friend-making, because individual people are not problems to be solved. If the great danger is to become Adolf Eichmann – the Holocaust organizer who was indifferent to the fact that the timetables and logistics he oversaw were part of the deportation and killing of millions of people – then our defense is to care more about our actions and their consequences, especially the effects on our fellow man.

This is similar to Postman’s final conclusion: that to resist Technopoly, we must be loving resistance fighters. We must understand that technology is a product of a particular economic and political context; that all technology carries with it “a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing;” and that all technology demands examination, judgment, and control.”

My corollary: Keeping an “a epistemological and psychic distance from any technology” requires an understanding of, and respect for, the dignity of the human soul. Distrust of technology will not change our society, our culture, our world so much as love for our fellow man.

Last January, postage for a first-class American stamp went from 46¢ to 49¢: a smallish change, seemingly, but one that nets the USPS millions (until another few years of inflation puts them back in the red). However, people with postage meters got a special rate of 48¢ – presumably because anyone with a meter would use more postage than the average stamp-buyer, so the post office ~magnanimously~ allowed a slight discount to such folks.

Our meter doesn’t have the envelope-catching bin, such that our envelopes tend to fall on the floor.

We have a postage machine at my office, which we load with $500.00 at a time and which is connected directly to the Postal Powers That Be. So when they raised the meter rate on May 31st to 48.5¢, it didn’t require any programming or effort on our part; it just made us go “Buh?” when the number was different all of a sudden.

Before realizing that oh yeah, this can only possibly apply to meters since stamps cost 49 cents anyway, I started researching half-pennies (because of course I did), despite the unlikeliness that they’d make a resurgence: they’ve been out of circulation for over 150 years. The US produced them from 1793 to 1857 and, “at the time of their discontinuation, the half cent had more buying power than a dime in 2012.” They’d be about equivalent to 14 cents today.Learning that makes it less surprising to read (6 months/over a year later) that pennies will be phased out. They enable exact change in a way that nickels and dimes cannot, especially when sales tax is taken into account, but even so these coins seem more poetic than practical nowadays: a sort of living fossil, appreciated by numismatists more than anyone else.

But that’s only the coin I mean. The value of a cent remains, even if it is a very small value; and a mere half-cent rate increase makes a huge difference if enough half-cents are involved! Just ask the postal service.

This post might easily be titled “Reading Regret: Addendum,” because this book is so regrettable that I fully expect you to ask “Why, exactly, did you even read it?”

To be honest, I keep asking myself the same thing and coming up short.

Here’s why I started: I have watched Fight Club a few times with various groups of friends. By the third viewing, I was less concerned with the plot and more interested in the philosophy behind the movie. Given that so many people watch it and discuss it, what are they most likely to take away from it? What sorts of ideas did the original book contain? Was it most concerned with making something meaningful of one’s life, or satisfied by fighting overweening consumerism with bloodsport, adrenaline, and mayhem? Was there anything true in the book, or was it all metaphysically suspect?

I decided to get it out of the library, found that it was already checked out, and elected to get another of Palahniuk’s novels instead of waiting for Fight Club. Which was silly, because Choke sat on my shelf all summer, and autumn, and winter, and I finally cracked it last week.

So much for why I started. The very first words are “If you’re going to read this, don’t bother,” and I ignored them, which means any unwanted gunk in my brain is my own dang fault.

It’s easy enough to read; swallow a couple chapters and you’ll probably be a little curious about what happens in the other 47, even if you choke occasionally on some nauseating detail or other. Victor, the deadpan snarky narrator, goes back and forth between describing his messed-up childhood, his abhorrent job, off-putting sexual encounters (his own and other people’s, as he is part of a sex addicts anonymous program), the hours spent visiting his mother (afflicted with dementia, such that she forgets to eat) at St. Anthony’s nursing home, and the revolting way he goes about getting more money for said home’s fees: purposefully choking at restaurants so someone else can swoop in, be a hero, and thus feel responsible for him forever (which apparently extends to sending him money periodically. I’m not sure what it says about me that I found that the least believable part of the book).

That summary makes it sound better than it is. The non-linear narrative remains engaging enough to see one through, and just as one becomes thoroughly grossed out by one anecdote, Victor turns to describe something else. Which is about all the positive spin I can put on it. The most sympathetic character is a recovering masturbation addict who sublimates his compulsions into collecting rocks to assemble into some kind of erection edifice. This book is Pandora’s box, except that instead of hope being shut inside at the end, you’re left with an ambiguous cessation of action. It’s everything I disliked about Catcher in the Rye, but far more sordid and gruesome. The congenital is not made congenial by making the pubic public; it’s just taking the dirt from its proper place in the garden and hurling it all over the coffee table, the kitchen, the bed.

Somehow, that approach feels significant; despite my disgust I wonder if it represents some aspect of reality, putting a finger to the pulse of what people believe in society today. There’s the conversational prose stuffed with informative tidbits. There’s a discussion about misogyny springing from misandry: how many times can everybody tell you that you’re the oppressive, prejudiced enemy before you give up and become the enemy[?] …I mean, in a world without God aren’t mothers the new god? The last sacred unassailable position. Isn’t motherhood the last perfect magical miracle? There’s a despairing rejection of religion, a blasphemous treatment of the specifically Christian, and so much emphasis on the carnality of flesh, all the filth that issues from it, and all the disgusting ways it breaks down.

I read Choke trying to understand whatever people might believe this, people with abusive childhoods and compulsion-riddled adolescence. But mostly I came away wondering if I’ve actually met people as hopeless as this. I came away full of pity for both Palahniuk and anyone bearing a passing resemblance to his creation, because this does not treat men like men: it treats them like animals, and then argues that this is preferable because knowledge brings pain.

There is no such thing as altruism here, no redemption, nothing noble or lovely or of good report. There is nothing admirable, just lust and gluttony and reveling in the foulness of what is foul.

If you want to learn about the diseases killing you and everyone around you, read WebMD. If you can’t think of the word you want but insist on trying the first that comes to mind, read a thesaurus. If you want to ruminate about the possibility that nothing good can exist without the risk of something bad, read Brave New World. If you want to contemplate “a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff,” read “The Weight of Glory.” If you want paradoxes, read Chesterton. If you want to muse about a past that cannot be remade, read “The Road Not Taken” or The Great Gatsby or Brideshead Revisited or An Artist of the Floating World.

This makes me wonder if there’s a way to convert solar years to internet years, because ten years on the internet is pretty much forever, right? There are times when I have to stop and ponder the fact that, in fact, this particular service has not existed as long as I have, that the entirety of my childhood and most of my adolescence were spent without it. Not to mention that which has followed in its train: widespread GIFs. Vines. Videos on Facebook. Videos EVERYWHERE.

Then there’s the plenitude of it. That one site can be the place to listen to music and share performances, to give DIY instructions, to find TV shows or movie clips, to document one’s family, to vlog, to share cat videos…

How did we exist without a convenient spot for cat videos for so long?! The mind, it boggles.

Other folks, in celebration of ten years of cat videos, have made lists of YouTube’s most-viewed offerings. While I’ve nothing against the surprised kitty, Sweet Brown, David after the Dentist, or NyanCat, I figured I’d share a different selection. These aren’t quite “videos you must watch to be my friend,” but they’re close.

I’m not sure where I found this book originally, but it called out to me and my word-loving sensibilities. Let it stand as a point in favor of libraries: you can have all the fun of impulse book-buying without any issues of budgeting (well, except your time) or storage (aside from the temporary tsundoku by your bed).

Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling is David Wolman’s journey through history to figure out just how English spelling became so confusing, whether it’s possible for it to be simplified, and what might become of the language in future. Wolman himself grew up with siblings whose competence in spelling left his ability far behind – not to mention the frustration that attended his classroom attempts at words like “different,” “restaurant” and “license,” words from various forebears with diverse paradigms. He heads on a road trip through various parts of England and America to discuss language shifts with a number of experts.

I was, for the most part, already familiar with a lot of his journey: the Wessex dialect of Old English spread on account of Alfred the Great’s influence; monks, clerics, and scribes set about copying manuscripts and Bibles; the Norman conquest brought an influx of French words, used mostly by the higher class. Then there was a bit of an English resurgence, due in part to the popularity of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible. Gutenberg’s printing press and its movable type meant that printing houses chose spellings that worked best for their margins, as opposed to the scribes who would tailor their wordwork for the ease of whoever was buying (and reading) it.

Chapter 5, which bridges the gap between the advent of printing and the publishing of Johnson’s dictionary, was the most illuminating section for me. It noted that self-appointed tastemakers and language-shapers in the 16th and 17th centuries favored this or that construction/spelling and set it apart as most “correct,” so as to distinguish the polloi from the more educated, stylish elite. For example, they included more Greek and Latinate terms, and, occasionally, tweaked certain words to more greatly resemble their fellows: rime became rhyme to match rhythm, delit became delight to match right and might (which had themselves undergone a shift, from pronouncing the “gh” to leaving it silent).

Then follows Samuel Johnson’s codification of English in his Dictionary of the English Language: In Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals, and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers, To Which Are Prefixed a History of the Language and an English Grammar. Spelling was far more settled by this point (1755), and the dictionary cemented it further.

The chapters following that detail some history of American English, including several different parties in the past 200 years who wished to render English spelling a simpler matter. Even today, the Simplified Spelling Society fights for a more efficient system. Admittedly, the members of said society aren’t quite sure which system to utilize instead…but they all agree that English has a lot of “booby traps,” spelling-wise, that students have to spend a lot of time learning to navigate.

For my own part, that navigation was easy. I grew up with the luxuries of educated, involved parents; plenty of reading material that taught me how words looked; and a fairly good memory for reproducing words, especially if I knew their etymology. Wolman addresses this in a chapter on the Scripps National Spelling Bee:

Manning says she sees words differently now that she’s a Bee parent. She had never thought much about all the other languages that influenced English spelling or the different parts of speech, but as her daughter developed a love of words and started studying for the Bee, Manning found that there was much more to spelling than just remembering what letters go where. “It’s those clues and weird little histories that you pick up – that’s what makes it interesting.”

…an orthography that is perfectly reflective of pronunciation may not be ideal. In isolation, words with silent or extra letters may strike people as inefficient, and at times they are. But in other cases, they help our brains draw dotted lines between words with related meanings, such as sign and signature, condemn and condemnation, dough and doughnut, or bomb and bombard.

After deftly navigating the arguments between prescriptivists, who wish to prescribe, or lay down rules, for ‘proper’ spelling and grammar, and descriptivists, who prefer to record how people are in fact using language from day to day, Wolman goes on to examine how we treat orthography in the 21st century. Nowadays, everyone’s computer or mobile device is outfitted with an spellchecker, which some suppose renders spelling irrelevant; does it matter if I forget the first “r” if my computer underlines “irelevant” with a red squiggle? If we all disregarded the red squiggle, would the spelling change? Wolman spends some time on the history of spellcheck before turning to Google and its suggested spelling function:

The last thing Google people want is to be perceived as setting rules or boundaries around what users do. A company as big as Google already has enough trouble dispelling fears of Big Brother-esque practices. “The question, ‘Do you mean?’ is deliberately ambiguous,” said Norvig. “What we’re not saying is, ‘Here’s how you spell.’” In this way, Google can be authoritative without being authoritarian, providing a snapshot of what’s out there in cyberspace without presuming to correct your English.

Chalk Google up as descriptivist, I guess. I lean toward the prescriptive side myself, though not as heavily as I did before reading this book. Reminding myself of the centuries of change English has already undergone makes me a tiny bit less likely to castigate someone’s spelling as wrong! …but see what I do next time something says “there” instead of “their.”

Overall, Righting the Mother Tongue is a fairly interesting book on the history of English orthography, a discussion of of spelling reform, and some description of the cognitive side of reading and writing (which helps account for the difficulties some people have in these activities). While he examines the weirdness behind certain words – the now-silent “g” in “right,” the “h” in “ghost” or “rhubarb,” the in-and-outs of “aisle” and “isle” – Wolman spends more time on the shaping of the English language as a whole:

“Language is people,” Crystal told me as we stared out at the River Avon. Words are not the flesh of thought entirely, for we also think in pictures, sounds, tastes, smells, and feelings. But words are an essential part of the flesh of society and cultural intercourse. They are products of human innovation, folly, power, preference, and change. For that reason, correct English is nothing more than a phantom. That doesn’t make English any less expansive and glorious, but the idea that there is clearly a right or a wrong way to go about the business of pronunciation, grammar, or even spelling, flies in the face of language’s true machinations.

English has grown and shifted before, an organism that changes with time and the people who use it. It is not petrified or ossified, but living: it will continue to grow and shift and, perhaps, look quite different in a generation or two.

commander, cellar-keeper, particular,
seamstress, mistress, fortress,
treasurer, stone-hearth-sweeper, and
Wife of
one
A.P. Rodney,
once visited New Orleans,
settling her bonnet lightly
and mouthing wonders at the distance
and decay
and desires to set up in so sunken a city.
She was
A (proud) native of Wilkinson County, Miss.
where rivers don’t float the dead
and every calendar day is
precious, perilous, alive.
but fever or war or accident found her,
and she, settling into the fog,
Died March Sth 1865.
A.P., never to remarry,
buried her in stone three feet over ground,
in a lichen-growing sepulchre that
will not hide the passage of one
Aged 34 yrs. 9 mos., & 7 days
as it eases her into eternity.

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